Pardon my ranting...

I do not have the time to give this the full attention it deserves, but this has just really pushed my buttons. I will hopefully be able to give a better update later.
The New Republic, a seething mass of liberals vomiting their hatred for all things conservative and spewing socialist opinions in the forms of facts, had been publishing a column called The Baghdad Diarist by a "passionate and talented" writer (their description, not mine) calling himself Scott Thomas. He claimed to be writing from Iraq while serving in the military, and was sharing stories of our troops gloriously representing their country by crushing stray dogs by swerving their Bradley Military Vehicles (have you seen those things?!!? How do you make them "swerve" exactly...), mocking a women whose face had been horribly disfigured from an IED, and wearing the bones of dead Iraqi children as crowns. I'm sure TNR put as much effort into validating these stories as Dan Rather & Company put into document verification. It involves a process similar to this:
1. Does it bash the military?
2. Does it try to portray the war and those fighting it in the most despicable light possible?
3. Oh heck, does it in any way further our radical, left-wing agenda?
Yes to all three? Cool! Let's print it!
I'm sure it comes as no surprise that after a lot of pressure and a military investigation of "Scott Thomas," it's been revealed that just about the only true thing he wrote was that he is in the military. I went to TNR to see what their response to this was, and let me tell you, only read their response if you have a barf bag handy. Here is TNR's reply. My favorite line in this was, "If the truth ends up reflecting poorly on our judgment, we will accept responsibility for that. But we also refuse to rush to judgment on our writer or ourselves." You refuse to rush to judgement!?!? Ironically, "rush" is too slow of a word to describe just how quickly you pounce on any anti-war propaganda someone is willing to dream up.

What makes me so sick about all of this is that so many liberals claim, "We support the troops, just not the war." Sorry, but that is a hypocritical, self-serving statement. Don't claim to support the troops, then gleefully race to publish any sick story that disparages the character of our men and women in uniform. I would like to think that the unmasking of "Scott Thomas" as a fraud will cause at least one liberal to pause and check the facts before assuming (and promoting the idea) that the Iraq War has turned all of the men and women serving there into babbling crazed idiots.

But, I doubt it.